Marie Davidson’s Feminist Techno Brought Humor to the Dancefloor This Year

The funniest song in dance music this year is no joke. Marie Davidson’s “Work It” is a punishing acid-house cut featuring the Montreal producer’s trademark spoken-word vocals—a coolly emphatic performance that lampoons the North American obsession with work. Her tongue is lodged so firmly in cheek, you’d need a backhoe to extract it (union-driven, of course). “You wanna know how I get away with everything?” she asks at the outset, her voice triumphant over hammering bass drums and cowbells. “I work—all the fucking time. From Monday to Friday, Friday to Sunday. I love it. I work.”

Suffice to say, this celebration of work as a symbol of virtue isn’t the usual message on dancefloors—particularly in techno, where “Friday to Sunday” is not an unreasonable amount of time for a single party to last. But work is a common comedic trope, and working it is a recurring theme in queer house music especially, wherein toil takes a backseat to pleasure. Davidson sharpens these tropes into a devastatingly effective anthem that skewers our culture’s hyper-capitalist obsession with productive labor. At the same time, the track subtly sends up contemporary dance music’s winners and losers obsession with lists and rankings.

“Work It” falls into a long tradition of dance music that foregrounds sardonic vocals, often to critique club culture itself. Simon Reynolds has written extensively about the way certain early-1990s tracks about drug paranoia—like 4 Hero’s “Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare,” in which a policeman informs a father that his son has overdosed—were a reaction to a scene where ecstasy’s rosy glow was beginning to curdle, as harder drugs and MDMA burnout took hold. Abe Duque and Blake Baxters’ 2004 track “What Happened?” applied a call-and-response refrain to a lament for shuttered clubs around the world: “The Limelight, NYC—what happened? … Mars, what happened? Ultraschall, what happened? Loveparade, what happened? Danceteria, what happened?” It’s a classic song in underground house, one whose power only magnifies as gentrification steamrolls nightlife the world over. In 2008, at the height of the bleep-bloop era, Chilean-German DJ Matias Aguayo spelled out his frustration with the flatlining sound of minimal techno. His track “Minimal” employed a sensually sung-whispered chorus in Spanish, peaking with the refrain, “Enough with minimal, already!”

Why are songs like these so effective? There’s something about the tension between dry humor and pumping groove that throws both into stark relief, yielding a fusion that’s irresistible. The master of the form is undoubtedly Green Velvet, whose mid-1990s tracks like “Flash” and “La La Land” are ambiguous snapshots of wee-hours depravity that resonate precisely because they hit so close to home. Even when not explicitly addressing club culture, his vocals have a way of making clubbing their subject anyway. “Answering Machine” is structured as a series of voicemail messages, each one more aggravating than the last—he gets dumped by his fiancé, evicted by his landlord, betrayed by a friend—followed by the shouted refrain, “I don’t need this shit!” With an entire club hollering along, it’s about as visceral an embodiment of Saturday night steam-letting as it gets: a kind of primal-scream therapy for the dancefloor, and an affirmation of the music’s power as self-care. His delivery makes the vocals funny; the sense of relief they trigger makes them true.

Davidson’s spoken-word vocals have been her secret weapon for a while now. Her surgically precise enunciation—reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s sly, sing-song cadence—infuse her springy acid-house throwbacks with wit and urgency. When she teases on “Work It,” “Is sweat dripping down your balls? Well then, you’re not a winner yet,” she frames the feminist dimension of her critique in no uncertain terms. The ugly truth is, women and nonbinary DJs and producers often have to work twice as hard as men to prove their worth in the club scene. That’s one of the subtexts of “Your Biggest Fan,” another searing vocal track off this year’s Working Class Woman. Among the song’s catalog of inanities well known to working DJs is one that any non-dude DJ will be able to relate to: “Can I help you roll your cables?”

So when Davidson says in “Work It,” “I work—all the fucking time,” I don’t think it’s meant entirely ironically—and no idle boast, either. More like a dare: Fucking try me. In a year when the discourse around dance music often revolved around issues regarding gender parity and representation, it was refreshing to hear those arguments make their way into the music itself, moving off social media and straight to the heart of the dancefloor.

Perhaps what makes Davidson’s approach so compelling is the way she combines humor with something darker. Toward the end of “Your Biggest Fan,” she whispers, “It’s not easy to stay sober, it’s not easy to stay sober.” “Day Dreaming” flips career advice into a haunting conclusion: “When you’re alone, you’re alone/Few years to live, then you’re gone.” And with 2016’s “Adieu au Dancefloor,” she swore off clubbing altogether, admitting, “It’s hell/It’s my life.” At its most vulnerable, Davidson’s music offers a weary peek behind the industry’s curtain. “Work It” is the flipside of that vulnerability—a swaggering declaration that’s determined to have the last laugh. Techno has seen plenty of ranters and preachers over the years, but it’s never had a narrator quite like Marie Davidson.